head to head · open source
chatbox vs BotSharp
chatbox has 42,247 GitHub stars, 4,307 forks, 1,290 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. BotSharp has 3,116 stars, 658 forks, 48 open issues and last shipped yesterday. chatbox leads on adoption by 1,256% (42,247 vs 3,116 stars). chatbox is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0; BotSharp is written in C# under Apache-2.0. chatbox has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, BotSharp 21%. BotSharp was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (chatbot), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| chatbox | BotSharp | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | C# |
| Last push | 2026-10-29 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 658 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick chatbox if
- You weight community size — 42K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick BotSharp if
- You want the BotSharp feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and BotSharp fits your workflow better
About chatbox
English 简体中文 Chatbox (Community Edition) Your Ultimate AI Copilot on the Desktop. Chatbox is a desktop client for ChatGPT, Claude and other LLMs, available on Windows, Mac, Linux This is the repository for the Chatbox Community Edition, open sourced under the GPLv3 license. Chatbox is going open source Again! We regularly sync code from the pro repo to this repo, and vice versa. Download Desktop Windows MacOS Linux Setup.exe Intel Apple Silicon AppImage iOS/Android .APK For more information: chatboxai.app Quick Start For End Users 1. Download the appropriate installer for your platform from the releases page 2…
read the full chatbox overview →
About BotSharp
The Open Source AI Agent Application Framework Connect LLMs to your existing application focused on your business "Conversation as a platform (CaaP) is the future, so it's perfect that we're already offering the whole toolkits to our .NET developers using the BotSharp AI BOT Platform Builder to build a CaaP. It opens up as much learning power as possible for your own robots and precisely control every step of the AI processing pipeline." BotSharp is an open source machine learning framework for AI Bot platform builder. This project involves natural language understanding, computer vision and audio processing…
read the full BotSharp overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is chatbox or BotSharp more popular?
chatbox has 42,247 GitHub stars and BotSharp has 3,116. chatbox has the larger community by that measure.
Are chatbox and BotSharp free?
Both are open source. chatbox is licensed under GPL-3.0 and BotSharp under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between chatbox and BotSharp?
chatbox is written in TypeScript and BotSharp in C#. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, chatbox or BotSharp?
Choose chatbox if you want the larger community (42,247 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose BotSharp if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.